Customer anomie: a sociological framework for understanding normlessness in customer-brand relationships

Standard voice-of-customer measurement is blind to a specific category of customer deterioration: customers who withdraw relationally while generating no complaints, survey responses, or negative signals. This paper offers a conceptual and theoretical contribution: it introduces customer anomie as the construct that explains this condition: a state of normlessness experienced when the relational contracts governing customer-brand relationships collapse or become unenforceable. Drawing on Durkheim and Merton, the paper develops a four-dimensional construct encompassing normative collapse, relational disorientation, institutional distrust, and social disconnection, and a multi-level antecedent framework spanning organizational, market-level, and sociocultural conditions. The paper distinguishes customer anomie from dissatisfaction, distrust, brand betrayal, and consumer alienation. The construct’s applicability is treated as conditioned on market structure rather than universal: it is expected to arise most clearly, and to most closely track its theoretical grounding, in markets where category-wide convergence constrains a customer’s ability to exit toward a materially different alternative.